Donald and Melania Trump’s marriage is a ‘compromise deal’

Donald and Melania Trump are in a “transactional” marriage in which he gets a sexy wife and she gets security, a former family friend claimed.

Former Vogue magazine executive Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who was friends with the First Lady for 15 years before they quarreled, hinted that the US president and his model wife were, in fact, not in love.

“I think it’s a transactional marriage. Donald has a sweet arm,” Winston Wolkoff, a former senior adviser to FLOTUS, said in an interview with the BBC.

“Melania had two dynamic decades. She was a young model, still not successful. She met Donald, got married, became an American citizen, had a child and 10 years later is the First Lady of the United States.” State.

“I think it was a magical moment, and I also think it was a made-for-television moment.”

His comments come when his controversial and revealing book, Melania & Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with The First Lady, was published on September 1. It is the first book written about Melania by someone who has been inside her. circle.

The book has been criticized by a spokeswoman for Melania, who said it was full of “falsehoods”.

“Twenty years ago, she had been a model barely getting by in Paris,” Winston Wolkoff writes in her book, according to an excerpt published in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine.

“Thirty years ago, she had lived in communist Slovenia.

“On the inauguration show … she wanted to appear as ‘First Lady Elect’ even though, as I reminded her, she had not actually been elected.”

Several other claims in the book include Melania’s secret war with the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and that the First Lady uses a private email account, which Donald Trump criticized for doing to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. .

Winston Wolkoff fell out with the First Lady after helping produce Donald Trump’s inauguration for $ 107 million in 2017, which was twice the cost of Barack Obama.

Controversy broke out over possible misuse of funds at the time, which was even the subject of a federal investigation, although Winston Wolkoff claims she was a scapegoat for decisions made by the Trump administration.

She was upset that the Trumps did not defend her when The New York Times reported that her firm had received more than $ 26 million for her role in the inauguration.

However, it has been reported that Winston Wolkoff’s book was based, in part, on secret audio recordings of the First Lady, in which Melania criticized her husband and other family members.

Winston Wolkoff admitted to taping some of his conversations with Melania, saying he did so to protect himself from becoming the “scapegoat” for the alleged misuse of funds.

Melania’s spokeswoman and chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, issued a scathing statement about Winston Wolkoff’s book earlier this month.

“Anyone who secretly tapes their best friend is by definition dishonest,” Grisham said.

“The book is full of falsehoods and paranoia, and clearly it is based on some imaginary need for revenge.”

Donald and Melania Trump (nee Knauss) got married in January 2005 in Palm Beach, Florida. The couple have a son together, Barron Trump, 14.